Dickinson to Durban » Entries tagged with "World Climate simulation"
Learning to Compromise
In roughly nine short weeks, the students of the Climate Change Africa Mosaic will be attending the 17th Conference of the Parties (COP-17) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). As this event draws nearer, it’s time we figure out exactly what goes on throughout this important meeting. Negotiations, political discussions, and potential solutions are all things what we should have a firm understanding of before we attend the conference. As an aide to this understanding, last week, we participated in the World Climate simulation exercise. Each person was a representative of a Developed Nation, Rapidly Developing Nation, or Developing Nation; for example, I represented South Africa, in the Rapidly Developing Nations category. Each category was provided with a chart, in which we imputed our expectations for CO2 emission … Read entire article »
Filed under: Summer Reading Responses
Cramped and Crowded
My favorite yoga teacher always jokes that the only way to get world leaders to agree on anything is to force them into doing hot yoga together. With yoga mats arranged only inches apart in a small studio heated to 98 degrees Fahrenheit, each state head would have to peacefully “negotiate” their space, attempting to stay fully conscious of their breathing and the future of the world as each sweats on the other. I could not help by remember this joke during our class simulation of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change last week. Each group comprised of ten or so countries divided into negotiating blocs denoted by their economic status: “developed,” “developing,” and “other developing” (i.e. “least developed”). We represented a specific state, simultaneously functioning under a … Read entire article »
Filed under: Climate Change, Key COP17 Issues, Mosaic Action, Summer Reading Responses
“Naivety breeds cooperation.”
Last Thursday night the entire Mosaic class (all upperclassmen) and a First-year seminar had the names of countries assigned to them and were put in a room for three hours and told to solve the problem of Global Climate Change. I can’t decide if it was harder or easier than I thought it would be. On one hand, it was a lot more difficult to solve the problem than I expected. At first everyone seemed eager to cooperate. As the night went on, however, people started to get protective of their designated country groups (Developed, Rapidly Developing, and Developing). As part of the Rapidly Developing Group (as India) I thought that it would be relatively easy to negotiate with the “Developed countries” if we just told them we would do what … Read entire article »
Filed under: Climate Change, Key COP17 Issues, Mosaic Action
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